Blogography DaveLouis
Pictures now, explanations later. Meanwhile, why not make your own. Frozen Custard, Ambulance and the satisfied looks… hmmm.
Piczar Photo
August 8th, 2008 | 3 Comments | Posted in Just My Art, Just My Life, Just My Nerdiness, Just My Photography
I’d really like for you guys to bookmark my new photo blog site, Piczar Photo.
I spent a lot of time trying to think of a cool name for a photography site but it seems like all the good names were taken.
The other day at Starbucks, my mother and I were brainstorming, trying to create a name for the blog. We tried tons of names when she joked, “How about Pixar, that’d be a cool name for a company!”, obviously joking. I then suggested that things that I dream never seem to work out in real life, maybe I should call it Dreamworks.
And then I thought… Picture Czar, Piczar (.com was taken btw). So Piczar Photo.
You can subscribe to the rss feed but that will only show newly taken photographs. As I upload old ones, most RSS feed aggregators won’t pick them up. Pictures taken from now on however will be picked up by your aggregator instantly. You might want to check out the Mosaic which has all the pictures at once to see if I’ve uploaded and old picture.
Tell me what you think. I’m using the Yet Another Photo Blog plugin for Wordpress to create this blog. So far I’m quite impressed with all of the features.
Mother Fucker
I just lost a 5 paged post. I’m pissed.
I just wrote a post that was so long, my hands now ache. It covered all the things that had happened to me in the past year that I had not blogged about so far. It was hard to write. It was personal. It was impossibly well linked. It had pictures and trackbacks. It told a story I have never told anyone. It was emotional. It was real.
Now it’s gone and I am so pissed off. This hasn’t happened to me in years. Not since Wordpress Autosaved.
Yeah, well it didn’t this time. I hit publish and it brought me to the login page. I even tried to quickly copy the entire post just in case, didn’t work.
I am so so so so so mad. This stuff shouldn’t happen.
I cannot type anymore, I’m nearly in tears and my hands hurt too much. Christ. The past hour and a half was a waste. Getting emotion out only to have it thrown away like trash doesn’t have the theraputic effect actually publishing does. Wordpress is dead to me right now.
I Wanna Be Popular
I began blogging back in 2002 using the site Xanga. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world and the community behind it was pretty great. I even paid the $25/yr to get Xanga Premium, and paid for a few friends just to keep them blogging. It was a pretty sad state, in high school and into college and stuck on Xanga.
It wasn’t long into my college career that I decided to make the move to something a little more powerful. MoveableType was the answer to my prayers. For the first time, I was in control of what I wrote, how it was presented and I didn’t even have to pay for it. I had tried LiveJournal (yuck) and Blogger (not bad but kinda boring) but there was something about another company potentially owning my material, or being able to shut me down, that bothered me.
As I began to grow my blog and needed more flexibility, and when TypePad started to want to charge me for features I used to get for free, I began another search for a great blogging platform. That is when I was introduced to Wordpress, which had only recently changed from b2.
Moving my site over from MoveableType was supposed to be really easy but I was new to the whole MySQL thing and, well I deleted most of my posts, possibly all of them.
Back when my blog first started, I was afraid of people reading it. Now, my friends and dorm mates all knew the address and read the blog, but anyone outside of that; well that made me quite nervous. My father had recently gotten a new job in a high position with a boss would was very much against homosexuality and if they found my blog, he could lose his job. Or so my brother convinced me.
Heck, my family didn’t know I was gay, I wasn’t really out to them; and that’s even a little iffy these days. But I was terrified that a professor or a family member would find the site and I’d be done with. So I kept the blog as a subdomain of my main site, Soundwise. I haven’t updated Soundwise since, oops.
It wasn’t until I moved to California that I felt comfortable with a blog that had its very own domain, and it even had my name in it. But that was the trick, if someone asked me, “I hear you have a site/blog, what’s the address?”
I would simply respond, “Oh, yes! The address is really simple, it’s just justin dot com.”
They would go, “awesome, I’ll have to check that out”
Clickity clackity, www.justin.com
Booyah, tricked. Now, if I wanted them to make it to my site I’d just say, “Oh yeah! just go to www.itsjustjustin.com”
Now-a-days I don’t worry so much. I am more or less completely out to my family and no longer have skeletons in my closet to worry about. I have made myself public and in many ways that is incredibly freeing.
Not only have I found a way to release stress and tell a story; I’ve found a new way to making friends. In the past two months I have made so many incredible friends through blogging and through one guy in particular, Jester from Jestertunes.com.
Here’s a quick list of bloggers I have recently befriended or have been inspired by their site…
Winterheart/Sunlight Sucks
ToriBlaine
Jestertunes
UncleMonkeyBoy
Blogography
Down With Pants!
Socially Dead
Snackie’s World
SecondHand Tryptophan
Brainporn
I read these blogs regularly and so do a lot of other people it seems. Snackiepoo seems to average 20-50+ comments on each of her blog posts, and that’s really nothing compared to some other bloggers who are getting hundreds of comments.
So what I’m here to find out is, how do they do this? I don’t care about monetizing my blog, that would be awesome but I just like blogging. I love to write and to post my photography out there and my thoughts on whatever comes to mind. But it seems that my hiatus a while back where I stopped posting really hurt me, I’m down to 50-300 hits a day. That’s too big of a range and only a comment or three per post? How disappointing.
I get the most hits on nerd posts. If I write about Apple or something totally nerdy, especially if I complain about something nerdy, hits galore.
Something personal, not terrible.
Photography… people love it but rarely comment (sad face)
Political (nothing, zero, zilch)
John Mayer Kissing Adam Levine CRAZINESS! Tons of hits and comments
So what is the key? What is it that makes people keep coming back and gets them to post comments? I’d love some input, especially from the guys on my blogroll.
To me, blogging is like High School all over again, we are all battling to make it to the top and we don’t mind shitting on anyone in order to get there. Well, I don’t care to be on the top, I just want to maybe make it up the bank of the mountain a bit; and I could use your help!
Much love,
Justin
Wordpress iPhone Native App Released
The new Wordpress app for the iPhone was just released, and blogged about right here! Check it out at:
It’s awesome. This is the first time I’ve used it and had it installed and to writing this post in under two minutes.
Let me know how it works out for you! Even the picture was embedded through the Wordpress application. I guess you can’t do inline formatted pictures, but meh, it can’t do everything I guess.
I’ll Be Better
I’ve been naughty
I’ll be better tomorrow, I promise.
Tags: Blogging, Just My Nerdiness, NaughtyTwitter Update
In case you haven’t noticed, I have put my Twitter feed onto the main page here. Just look to the top right of the front page of the blog. Check it out, hey, maybe even join Twitter and join the conversation.
Not Lazy
I really don’t feel like I’m being lazy with my site right now. I have updated the look of the site, fixed some security holes, added some widgets and worked to make a better flow.
However, when I don’t make an actual post, my site traffic drops to a near crawl. I will try to be better at keeping the blog more up to date. I actually have posts in my head, I just seem to have trouble getting out of my head and onto the screen.
I am going to work on writing up a post tonight after hanging out with Chadd and possibly Michael and maybe going to Lance’s 22nd birthday party. I’m acutally at Chadd’s right now typing this on my iPhone. He’s running a bit being schedule due to work being so busy.
Speaking of being so busy, even without a job or classes, I’ve managed to keep myself quite busy and weekends are no exception! Ryan and I have made some serious headway on our patio garden. Today I planted a ln assortment of five different florals totalling around 100 different plants. Just getting the seeds started so that we can plant them into pots later.
I’m gonna end this post, not sure how much more the iPhone can handle!
Tags: Blogging, Chadd, Flowers, Garden, RyanQumana
February 4th, 2008 | No Comments | Posted in Just My Fabulousness, Just My Life, Just My Nerdiness, Just My Photography
I’m going to try using this new program, well new to me, called Qumana to post to my blog. Unfortunately, the program puts this little tag, a signature if you will, at the bottom of all my posts. I will leave it on this entry so you can see what I’m talking about but I really don’t like it!
This does do a very nice job of wordpressing though. Online my site lags a little as I type and move images around etc. It also has spell check, not that I need it… haha
Anyways, I gotta go to the condo, that’s where Ryan and I live. I still have my apartment but we use it less and less it seems. So sad because the place is gorgeous! Seriously though, I really do love my apartment, I wish we could live here… and there, but it just wears us out too much. We need to find a way to merge the two into one place… hmmm
The ER tonight was more than busy. Busy is an understatement. We had over twenty people in the waiting room and more checking in the entire time I worked. It was the busiest night I have yet worked. What was in the air today?
In other news, Panic! At the Disco has a new CD coming out in March. Not sure what that mean to me exactly. Of course, the teenybopper part of me (aside, teenybopper is spelled correctly according to Qumana, who knew that was even a real word!) will be getting that CD the day it comes out, who knows, I might even pre-order.
In other news, you know your door/lock/intercom is too old when a locksmith walks by and leaves his business card.
That picture comes from our (Ryan and I) trip to New York. Which reminds me… I miss New York!
First picture I used a Flickr (wow, it even knows how to spell Flickr!) link to post and the second I used Qumana to upload and post… Impressive! Might never need to go to my wordpress admin page again!
Both pictures were taken with my iPhone… as we ran around the city from Apple store to Apple store trying to keep it charged! It went two days of SOLID use before dying when we got home. Incredible.
Ok, I’m out like gout. Catch you guys on the flip-side.
Powered by Qumana
Tags: Blogging, Hmm, LoL, New Years, New York, Photography, Ryan, Software, Ugh, WorkHere’s an Idea
So people have been getting onto me not posting enough these days. I guess it is because of several reasons, mostly because I am working so much or in class or otherwise busy. Once Ryan and I get the internet setup at our place and I find my rhythm I hopefully will be up here more often.
I also have been bad about posting due to the fact that I haven’t been able to take pictures. I like to post with a picture and for the longest time my lens was broken or the weather was shitty. Once again, once things heat up I plan to take more pics and enjoy the weather. Mostly though, it is working so much that has me not posting. I need something to inspire me. Photography normally does it and so does doing actual social things. Lately I haven’t been so social…
Let’s hope I can be better at all of this. Meanwhile, here is my first episode of my fake podcast. Off to you Alex! Oh wait, that’s me!
Tags: Blogging, Downer, Ugh
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